At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a rather macabre exhibit has been on display. Entitled ‘Victimless Leather’, it’s a miniature ‘leather’ jacket made from living mouse stem cells growing on a polymer matrix.

As art, one interpretation could be that it shows how artifacts currently made from dead animal bits can instead be grown from tissue cultures; another might be that it illustrates the incredibly weird implications of modern biology.

Unfortunately, given unlimited nutrients and a lack of other constraints, tissue cultures have a tendency to keep on growing, which this one did. After a week or two, it clogged several of its nutrient feeds, making it necessary that it be put down. “I felt cruel when I turned it off,” said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator responsible for killing it.

There’s been a lot of coverage of this; here’s a few articles:

• New York Times
• Bioethics.net
• io9
• Museum of Modern Art – unfortunately, I don’t appear to able to access their site at the moment.

A related issue is ‘test tube meat’ – meat grown from cell cultures in a laboratory. Intriguingly, PETA, a sometimes radical animal rights group, have stumped up a $1,000,000 reward for its development.. Clearly this is because this approach would alleviate the suffering of a great many farm animals. It may well also reduce the environmental burden caused by industrial scale animal husbandry.

I find both of these items really intriguing, as it brings up many interesting questions. If you’re game, please leave a comment with your answers to these questions..

1. Is the use of tissue cultures more or less ethical than the use of parts taken from dead animals? Are concerns of dignity relevant here?
2. Is it ethical to use human tissue cultures in art?
3. Is it ethical to use human tissue cultured from human induced pluripotent stem cells?
4. For those who aren’t against the use of embryonic stem cells in research, how would you feel about tissue cultured from such a line being used in art, remembering that this wouldn’t necessitate the destruction of additional embryos – once created, the cell line can be grown and divided effectively indefinitely.
5. What other uses of human tissue cultures are ethical? If it’s more ethical to use tissue cultures than animal parts, what uses of human parts cross the line into acceptable? Transplant organ growth? Regenerative therapies? Long Pig?
6. Is forming an emotional relationship with an object made from live cells more or less strange than forming emotional relationships with animals? With non-living organisms? With plants? Would you love your living leather coat more or less than your regular leather coat

(x-posted to LJ)

For those who like pretty astronomical pictures..

ESO has a press release out with several photos of interesting solar phenomena, including the rare green flash and even rarer blue flash, both caused by the earth’s atmosphere acting as a prism when the sun’s light hits it with a very low grazing angle at sunrise or sunset. More in wikipedia

They’ve also got photos of the zodiacal light and Gegenschein, both caused by solar light reflecting off interplanetary dust..

For those not so fascinated by astronomy, here’s a bunny.

via George,

An amusing take on what entertainment might be like 50 years from now.

How plausible is full sensory experience and interface like this by the date offered in the video (2062)?

Right now, it might look like far future fiction, but I’m fairly sure that’s not the case. Enabling technologies necessary for virtual reality of this level either exist already, are in development, or are at least theoretically possible.

The nanomachines necessary seem almost inevitable, particularly as the necessary components for these (antenna, propulsion, power) are in development, with experimental devices either complete or nearing completion. Similarly, the computing power necessary also seems easily achievable.

So, to me, the main remaining obstacle is complexity. That is, while we can create the necessary devices, and produce the necessary content, can we string these all together into the necessary engineered systems? We’re pretty awful at this sort of thing when it comes to building large scale software solutions, largely because of the need for rapid change and adaptation. It seems that brain interfaces of this fidelity must adapt quite precisely to the neural topology of the individual, and it would seem that these must vary widely at the level of neurons, meaning that any engineered system interfacing with the brain must be heavily customizable to accomodate this.

This, by the way, is my general concern with some of the technology ideals before us – I trust our ability to invent and create devices, but I don’t trust our ability to coordinate them.

For the last two weeks I’ve been working on a research survey and report on virtual worlds – things such as Second Life, OpenSim, OpenCroquet and the like. I’ve just now finished tidying it up, and sent it off, with much relief; it’s 50 pages long, and the longest writing project I’ve engaged in since completing my Masters thesis two years ago.

It marks a bit of a milestone for me – it’s the first fully independent, paid research contract I’ve done. Though stressful, it was actually quite a lot of fun and taught me a lot about rapidly gathering together notes from lots of sources and cobbling them together in a report. I learned quite a bit more about virtual worlds, in the process, too.

It was also the first time I’ve had to hire and manage my own subcontractors – in this case, I hired Morbid Curiousity to help out by writing research notes and helping a little with reviewing. This also was quite illuminating – in hindsight, the small amount of extra work was certainly worthwhile; getting someone else involved me with a second perspective on the topic and helped me formulate my own ideas for the document’s structure and content.

I’m going to keep the report embargoed for a week or two; I’ve been assured that despite the contract, I maintain copyright over the work, but I want to wait until my client has had a chance to review it first. After that, I’ll be making the whole thing available as well as posting and expanding on certain parts of it that I think people might find interesting..

When a supernova occurs, it releases a burst of neutrinos and gamma rays that would obliterate life anywhere in the vicinity – within a couple of hundred light years, apparently. There’s no obvious supernova candidates nearby, so this isn’t something to worry about – it’s more of an amusing science fiction plot.

When a binary supernova occurs (two stars circling into one another), gamma rays are concentrated in two beams shooting out along the axis around which the two stars are rotating. Because it’s so concentrated, the range at which it is harmful is much greater – apparently, some researchers suggest that a late Ordovician mass extinction was due to something like this.

Anyway, the picture is of a binary system about 8000 lyrs away. It’s rather a pretty barrel to be looking down, really..

via Cosmos. Read the article for more interesting details..

Prosthetic limbs are another harbinger of the future. They’re becoming increasingly sophisticated, and it looks like IEEE Spectrum is going to run a special issue on them in February.

There’s an interesting article up now about the ‘Luke’ arm, named for Luke Skywalker’s prosthetic in Empire Strikes Back. Check it out in this video.

What’s really cool is the range of control mechanisms available – gone are cumbersome mechanical arrangements, replaced by controls based on nerve signals, twitching related muscles, or even underused muscle groups such as toes. The video below shows an arm based entirely on neural feedback – the patient doesn’t need to learn special commands – his prosthetic responds to messages from his brain similarly to a real one.

Another article discusses cosmeses – coverings for the arm mechanics designed to make them look real. Unfortunately, there’s no pictures, though from the description of “silver-black carbon fiber, shimmering with a pattern of subtle scales” sounds pretty damned awesome.So far, no one has replaced their body parts with prosthetics voluntarily, but given their progress and potential, I give it at most ten years.

I’ve always loved the name ‘rail gun’ – of all the various futuristic weapons concepts I’ve encountered, it’s probably the most down to earth name. And, since it’s based on an idea you can replicate at home with a bunch of wire and a battery, it’s always seemed one of the most practical.

The US Navy’s been interested in rail guns for use on their various capital ships – they’re aiming for a 64 MJ version that will be able to lob projectiles up to 200 miles.

A recent article in the MIT Technology Review describes a 10 MJ gun which is nonetheless scarily impressive. Particularly because, at over 2 kilometres a second, a 3 kg slug is travelling fast enough to cause flakes of aluminium on it to spontaneously combust, leaving an impressive fiery tail.

Video